A century and a half ago, Joseph Smith and his followers
were reviled and forced into a march across the plains to found a new Zion
in Utah. Now, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is making
dramatic strides into the mainstream -- both as a faith and as a dynamic
financial enterprise, a combination of virtues that may make it the religion
of America's future.

Salt Lake City Was Just for Starters -- the Mormons' True Great Trek
Has Been to Social Acceptance and a $30 Billion Church Empire

In Salt Lake City, Utah, on a block known informally as Welfare Square,
stands a 15-barreled silo filled with wheat: 19 million lbs., enough to
feed a small city for six months. At the foot of the silo stands a man
-- a bishop with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints --
trying to explain why the wheat must not be moved, sold or given away.

Around the corner is something called the bishop's storehouse. It is
filled with goods whose sole purpose is to be given away. On its shelves,
Deseret-brand laundry soaps manufactured by the Mormon Church nestle
next to Deseret-brand canned peaches from the Mormon cannery in Boise,
Idaho. Nearby are Deseret tuna from the church's plant in San Diego, beans
from its farms in Idaho, Deseret peanut butter and Deseret pudding. There
is no mystery to these goods: they are all part of the huge Mormon welfare
system, perhaps the largest nonpublic venture of its kind in the country.
They will be taken away by grateful recipients, replaced, and the replacements
will be taken away.

But the grain in the silo goes nowhere. The bishop, whose name is Kevin
Nield, is trying to explain why. "It's a reserve," he is saying.
"In case there is a time of need."

What sort of time of need?

"Oh, if things got bad enough so that the normal systems of distribution
didn't work." Huh? "The point is, if those other systems broke
down, the church would still be able to care for the poor and needy."

What he means, although he won't come out and say it, is that although
the grain might be broken out in case of a truly bad recession, its root
purpose is as a reserve to tide people over in the tough days just before
the Second Coming.

"Of course," says the bishop, "we rotate it every once
in a while."

For more than a century, the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints suffered because their vision of themselves and
the universe was different from those of the people around them. Their
tormentors portrayed them as a nation within a nation, radical communalists
who threatened the economic order and polygamists out to destroy the American
family. Attacked in print, and physically by mobs, some 30,000 were forced
to flee their dream city of Nauvoo, Ill., in 1846. Led by their assassinated
founder's successor, they set out on a thousand-mile trek westward
derided by nonbelievers as being as absurd as their faith.

This year their circumstances could not be more changed. Last Tuesday,
150 years to the week after their forefathers, 200 exultant and sunburned
Latter-day Saints reached Salt Lake City, having re-enacted the
grueling great trek. Their arrival at the spot where, according to legend,
Brigham Young announced, "This is the right place" was cheered
in person by a crowd of 50,000 -- and observed approvingly by millions.
The copious and burnished national media attention merely ratified a long-standing
truth: that although the Mormon faith remains unique, the land in which
it was born has come to accept -- no, to lionize -- its adherents as paragons
of the national spirit. It was in the 1950s, says historian Jan Shipps,
that the Mormons went from being "vilified" to being "venerated,"
and their combination of family orientation, clean-cut optimism, honesty
and pleasant aggressiveness seems increasingly in demand. Fifteen Mormon
Senators and Representatives currently trek the halls of Congress. Mormon
author and consultant Stephen R. Covey bottled parts of the ethos in The
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which has been on best-seller
lists for five years. The FBI and cia, drawn by a seemingly incorruptible
rectitude, have instituted Mormon-recruitment plans.

The Mormon Church is by far the most numerically successful creed born
on American soil and one of the fastest growing anywhere. Its U.S. membership
of 4.8 million is the seventh largest in the country, while its hefty 4.7%
annual American growth rate is nearly doubled abroad, where there are already
4.9 million adherents. Gordon B. Hinckley, the church's President -- and
its current Prophet -- is engaged in massive foreign construction, spending
billions to erect 350 church-size meetinghouses a year and adding
15 cathedral-size temples to the existing 50. University of Washington
sociologist Rodney Stark projects that in about 83 years, worldwide Mormon
membership should reach 260 million.

The church's material triumphs rival even its evangelical advances.
With unusual cooperation from the Latter-day Saints hierarchy (which
provided some financial figures and a rare look at church businesses),
TIME has been able to quantify the church's extraordinary financial vibrancy.
Its current assets total a minimum of $30 billion. If it were a corporation,
its estimated $5.9 billion in annual gross income would place it midway
through the FORTUNE 500, a little below Union Carbide and the Paine Webber
Group but bigger than Nike and the Gap. And as long as corporate rankings
are being bandied about, the church would make any list of the most admired:
for straight dealing, company spirit, contributions to charity (even the
non-Mormon kind) and a fiscal probity among its powerful leaders that
would satisfy any shareholder group, if there were one.

Yet the Latter-day Saints remain sensitive about their "otherness"
-- more so, in fact, than most outsiders can imagine. Most church members
laughed off Dennis Rodman's crack about "f -- -- _ Mormons" during
the N.B.A. championships. But the subsequent quasi apology by Rodman's
coach Phil Jackson that his player hadn't known they were "some kind
of a cult or sect" deeply upset both hierarchy and membership. Perhaps,
however, they should learn to relax. Historian Leonard J. Arrington says
the church, along with the values it represents, "has played a role,
and continues to play a role, in the economic and social development of
the West -- and indeed, because of the spread of Mormons everywhere, of
the nation as a whole." And in a country where religious unanimity
is ever less important but material achievement remains the earthly manifestation
of virtue, their creed may never face rejection again.

The top beef ranch in the world is not the King Ranch in Texas. It is
the Deseret Cattle & Citrus Ranch outside Orlando, Fla. It covers 312,000
acres; its value as real estate alone is estimated at $858 million. It
is owned entirely by the Mormons. The largest producer of nuts in America,
AgReserves, Inc., in Salt Lake City, is Mormon-owned. So are the Bonneville
International Corp., the country's 14th largest radio chain, and the Beneficial
Life Insurance Co., with assets of $1.6 billion. There are richer churches
than the one based in Salt Lake City: Roman Catholic holdings dwarf Mormon
wealth. But the Catholic Church has 45 times as many members. There is
no major church in the U.S. as active as the Latter-day Saints in
economic life, nor, per capita, as successful at it.

The first divergence between Mormon economics and that of other denominations
is the tithe. Most churches take in the greater part of their income through
donations. Very few, however, impose a compulsory 10% income tax on their
members. Tithes are collected locally, with much of the money passed on
informally to local lay leaders at Sunday services. "By Monday,"
says Elbert Peck, editor of Sunstone, an independent Mormon magazine, the
church authorities in Salt Lake City "know every cent that's been
collected and have made sure the money is deposited in banks." There
is a lot to deposit. Last year $5.2 billion in tithes flowed into Salt
Lake City, $4.9 billion of which came from American Mormons. By contrast,
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with a comparable U.S. membership,
receives $1.7 billion a year in contributions. So great is the tithe flow
that scholars have suggested it constitutes practically the intermountain
states' only local counterbalance in an economy otherwise dominated by
capital from the East and West coasts.

The true Mormon difference, however, lies in what the LDS church does
with that money. Most denominations spend on staff, charity and the building
and maintenance of churches; leaders will invest a certain amount -- in
the case of the Evangelical Lutherans, $152 million -- as a pension fund,
usually through mutual funds or a conservative stock portfolio. The philosophy
is minimalist, as Lutheran pastor Mark Moller-Gunderson explains:
"Our stewardship is not such that we grow the church through business
ventures."

The Mormons are stewards of a different stripe. Their charitable spending
and temple building are prodigious. But where other churches spend most
of what they receive in a given year, the Latter-day Saints employ
vast amounts of money in investments that TIME estimates to be at least
$6 billion strong. Even more unusual, most of this money is not in bonds
or stock in other peoples' companies but is invested directly in church-owned,
for-profit concerns, the largest of which are in agribusiness, media,
insurance, travel and real estate. Deseret Management Corp., the company
through which the church holds almost all its commercial assets, is one
of the largest owners of farm-and ranchland in the country, including
49 for-profit parcels in addition to the Deseret Ranch. Besides the
Bonneville International chain and Beneficial Life, the church owns a 52%
holding in ZCMI, Utah's largest department-store chain. (For a more
complete list, see chart.) All told, TIME estimates that the Latter-day
Saints farmland and financial investments total some $11 billion, and that
the church's nontithe income from its investments exceeds $600 million.

The explanation for this policy of ecclesiastical entrepreneurism lies
partly in the Mormons' early experience of ostracism. Brigham Young wrote
150 years ago that "the kingdom of God cannot rise independent of
Gentile nations until we produce, manufacture, and make every article of
use, convenience or necessity among our people." By the time the covered
wagons and handcarts had concluded their westward roll, geographic isolation
had reinforced social exclusion: the Mormons' camp on the Great Salt Lake
was 800 miles from the nearest settlement. Says Senator Bob Bennett, whose
grandfather was a President: "In Young's day the church was the only
source of accumulated capital in the territory. If anything was built,
it had to be built by the church because no one else had any money."

In the first century of corporate Mormonism, the church's leaders were
partners, officers or directors in more than 900 Utah-area businesses.
They owned woolen mills, cotton factories, 500 local co-ops, 150 stores
and 200 miles of railroad. Moreover, when occasionally faced with competition,
they insisted that church members patronize LDS-owned businesses.
Eventually this became too much for the U.S. Congress. In 1887 it passed
the Edmunds-Tucker Act, specifically to smash the Mormons' vertical
monopolies.

But there is an additional aspect to the Mormons' spectacular industry
and frugality. Their faith, like several varieties of American Protestantism,
holds that Jesus will return to earth and begin a thousand-year rule,
this glory preceded by a period of turmoil and chaos. During the dark years,
church members understand that it is their destiny to sustain a light to
help usher in the kingdom to come. In their preparations to do so, they
shame even the most avid of secular survivalists. Church members are advised
to keep one year's food and other supplies on hand at all times, and many
do. The wheat-filled Welfare Square grain elevator fulfills the same
principle. Of the millennium, President Hinckley says, "We hope we're
preparing for it. We hope we'll be prepared when it comes."

But Hinckley qualifies that: "We don't spend a lot of time talking
about or dreaming about the millennium to come; we've always been a practical
people dealing with the issues of life. We're doing today's job in the
best way we know how." From the beginning, the Saints' millennial
strain was modulated by a delight in the economic nitty-gritty. Of
some 112 revelations received by the first Prophet and President of the
church, Joseph Smith, 88 explicitly address fiscal matters. And although
the faithful believe the "End Times" could begin shortly, their
actual date is (to humankind) indefinite, and certain key signs and portents
have not yet manifested themselves. Rather than wild-eyed fervor,
most church moneymen project a can-do optimism.

Or, in their higher echelons, a case-hardened if amiable professionalism.
A primary reason for the church's business triumphs, says University of
Washington sociologist Stark, is that it has no career clerics, only amateurs
who have been plucked for service from successful endeavors in other fields.
(In fact, there is no ordained clergy whatsoever: the term priest applies
to all males over age 12 in good standing in the church, and "bishops,"
while supervising congregations, are part-time lay leaders.) Religious
observers point out that this creates a vacuum of theological talent in
a church with a lot of unusual theology to explain. But the benefit, notes
Stark, is that "people at the top of the Mormon church have immense
experience in the world. These guys have been around the track. Why do
they choose to invest directly? Because they are not helpless. They are
a bunch of hard-nosed businessmen." Rodney Brady, who runs Deseret
Management Corp., has a Harvard business doctorate, served as executive
vice president of pharmaceutical giant Bergen Brunswig and from 1970 to
'72 was Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education
and Welfare. Similar figures fill the church's upper management: Tony Burns,
a "stake president" (the rough equivalent of an archbishop),
is chairman of Miami-based Ryder Systems, the truck-rental empire.

And then there is Jon Huntsman. Currently a powerful "area authority,"
Huntsman may at some point make official church fiscal policy. But right
now he is exemplary of the Mormon gift for not only making a buck but also
spending it on others. An enthusiastic missionary as a young man, at age
42 he was asked to serve as "mission president" for a group of
220 young proselytizers in Washington. He took leave from his company and
moved his wife and nine children with him. When his stint was up, they
headed back to Utah, and Huntsman resumed building the $5 billion, 10,000-employee
Huntsman Chemical Corp., which he owns outright. Ten years ago, Huntsman
shifted his company's mission from pure profit to a three-part priority:
pay off debt, be a responsible corporate citizen and relieve human suffering.
Thus far, his company has donated $100 million of its profit to a cancer
center at the University of Utah. It has also built a concrete plant in
Armenia to house those rendered homeless by the 1988 earthquake, and it
is active in smaller charities ranging from children's hospitals to food
banks. Since the shift, says Huntsman, "we have a far greater spirit
of accomplishment and motivation. Our unity and teamwork and corporate
enthusiasm have never been higher." And he still puts in his 15 to
20 hours a week as a lay clergyman. He concludes, "I find it impossible
to separate life and corporate involvement from my religious convictions."

And that, of course, begs the question: Just what, exactly, is the belief
underlying those convictions, the rock upon which faith and empire are
built?

Mormon theology recognizes the Christian Bible but adds three holy books
of its own. It holds that shortly after his resurrection, Jesus Christ
came to America to teach the indigenous people, who were actually a tribe
of Israel, but that Christian churches in the Old World fell into apostasy.
Then, starting in 1820, God restored his "latter-day" religion
by dispatching the angel Moroni to reveal new Scriptures to a simple farm
boy named Joseph Smith near Palmyra, N.Y. Although the original tablets,
written in what is called Reformed Egyptian, were taken up again to heaven,
Smith, who received visits from God the father, Jesus, John the Baptist
and saints Peter, James and John, translated and published the Book of
Mormon in 1830. He continued to receive divine Scripture and revelations.
One of these was that Christ will return to reign on earth and have the
headquarters of his kingdom in a Mormon temple in Jackson County, Mo. (Over
time, the church has purchased 14,465 acres of land there.)

There is a long list of current Mormon practices foreign to Catholic
or Protestant believers. The best known revolve around rituals of the temples,
which are barred to outsiders. At "endowment" ceremonies, initiates
receive the temple garments, which they must wear beneath their clothing
for life. Marriages are "sealed," not only until death doth part,
but for eternity. And believers conduct proxy baptisms for the dead: to
assure non-Mormon ancestors of an opportunity for salvation, current
Mormons may be immersed on their behalf. The importance of baptizing one's
progenitors has led the Mormons to amass the fullest genealogical record
in the world, the microfilmed equivalent of 7 million books of 300 pages
apiece.

Members of the church celebrate the Lord's Supper with water rather
than wine or grape juice. They believe their President is a prophet who
receives new revelations from God. These can supplant older revelations,
as in the case of the church's historically most controversial doctrine:
Smith himself received God's sanctioning of polygamy in 1831, but 49 years
later, the church's President announced its recision. Similarly, an explicit
policy barring black men from holding even the lowest church offices was
overturned by a new revelation in 1978, opening the way to huge missionary
activity in Africa and Brazil.

Mormons reject the label polytheistic pinned on them by other Christians;
they believe that humans deal with only one God. Yet they allow for other
deities presiding over other worlds. Smith stated that God was once a humanlike
being who had a wife and in fact still has a body of "flesh and bones."
Mormons also believe that men, in a process known as deification, may become
God-like. Lorenzo Snow, an early President and Prophet, famously aphorized,
"As man is now, God once was; as God now is, man may become."
Mormonism excludes original sin, whose expiation most Christians understand
as Christ's great gift to humankind in dying on the Cross.

All this has led to some withering denominational sniping. In 1995 the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) issued national guidelines stating that the
Mormons were not "within the historic apostolic tradition of the Christian
Church." A more sharply edged report by the Presbyterians' Utah subunit
concluded that the Latter-day Saints "must be regarded as heretical."
The Mormons have responded to such challenges by downplaying their differences
with the mainstream. In 1982 an additional subtitle appeared on the covers
of all editions of the Book of Mormon: "Another Testament of Jesus
Christ." In 1995 the words Jesus Christ on the official letterhead
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were enlarged until
they were three times the size of the rest of the text. In Salt Lake City's
Temple Square, the guides' patter, once full of proud references to Smith,
is almost entirely Christological. "We talk about Christ a lot more
than we used to," says magazine editor Peck, whose journal's outspokenness
has earned him an edgy relationship with the church. "We want to show
the converts we are Christians."

And not just the converts. In an interview with TIME, President Hinckley
seemed intent on downplaying his faith's distinctiveness. The church's
message, he explained, "is a message of Christ. Our church is Christ-centered.
He's our leader. He's our head. His name is the name of our church."
At first, Hinckley seemed to qualify the idea that men could become gods,
suggesting that "it's of course an ideal. It's a hope for a wishful
thing," but later affirmed that "yes, of course they can."
(He added that women could too, "as companions to their husbands.
They can't conceive a king without a queen.") On whether his church
still holds that God the Father was once a man, he sounded uncertain, "I
don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it ... I understand
the philosophical background behind it, but I don't know a lot about it,
and I don't think others know a lot about it."

It would be tempting to assign the Mormons' success in business to some
aspect of their theology. The absence of original sin might be seen as
allowing them to move confidently and guiltlessly forward. But it seems
more likely that both Mormonism's attractiveness to converts and its fiscal
triumphs owe more to what Hinckley terms "sociability," an intensity
of common purpose (and, some would add, adherence to authority) uncommon
in the non-Mormon business or religious worlds. There is no other
major American denomination that officially assigns two congregation members
in good standing, as Mormonism does, to visit every household in their
flock monthly. Perhaps in consequence, no other denomination can so consistently
parade the social virtues most Americans have come around to saying they
admire. The Rev. Jeffrey Silliman, of the same Presbyterian group that
made the heresy charge, admits that Mormons "have a high moral standard
on chastity, fidelity, honesty and hard work, and that's appealing."

There are limits to Mormon sociability. In 1993 the church capped a
harsh campaign of intellectual purification against dozens of feminists
and dissidents with the excommunication of D. Michael Quinn, a leading
historian whose painstaking work documented Smith's involvement with the
occult and church leaders' misrepresentation of some continued polygamy
in the early 1900s. The current crackdown, some analysts believe, stems
from fears of loss of control as the church becomes more international.
Most think it will get worse if, as is likely, the church's hard-line
No. 3 man, Boyd Packer, someday becomes President. Some wonder how the
strict Mormon sense of hierarchy, along with the church's male-centered,
white-dominated and abstemious nature, will play as the faith continues
to spread past the naturally conservative mountain states.

Yet it is hard to argue with Mormon uniformity when a group takes care
of its own so well. The church teaches that in hard times, a person's first
duty is to solve his or her own problems and then ask for help from the
extended family. Failing that, however, a bishop may provide him or her
with cash or coupons redeemable at the 100 bishops' storehouse depots,
with their Deseret-brand bounty. The largesse is not infinite: the
system also includes 97 employment centers, and Mormon welfare officials
report that a recipient generally stays on the dole between 10 and 12 weeks,
at an average total cash value of $300. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect
of the system is its funding, which does not, as one might expect, come
out of tithes. Rather, once a month, church members are asked to go without
two meals and contribute their value to the welfare system. The fast money
is maintained and administered locally, so that each community can care
for its own disadvantaged members.

"Our whole objective," says Hinckley, "is to make bad
men good and good men better, to improve people, to give them an understanding
of their godly inheritance and of what they may become." And he intends
to do it globally. In what will undoubtedly become the hallmark of his
presidency, he is in the process of a grand expansion, the organizational
follow-up to the massive missionary work the church has long engaged
in overseas. To gather the necessary capital for it, Hinckley has decelerated
the growth of Mormon domestic investments: although still on the increase,
their pace is far below that of previous decades, and the church has extracted
itself from such previously Mormon-heavy fields as banking, hospitals,
private schools and sugar. The church authorities have removed the tithe
from the authority of local administrators and pulled every penny of it
back to Salt Lake City for delegation by a more select and internationally
minded group of managers.

No one thinks the push abroad, and the complementary balancing act domestically,
will be easy. Says Bradley Bertoch, a venture capitalist (and nonpracticing
Mormon) who specializes in attracting money to Utah: "The church needs
to recruit adequate labor to drive its business growth beyond the borders
of the U.S. But at the same time it has to make sure that it doesn't lose
control of the home ground. It's the same problem of resource allocation
in new markets faced by any multinational."

Will it succeed? Will the generations of young Mormon men who have so
avidly evangelized beyond the borders of their country be followed by a
fiscal juggernaut that will make the church as respected a presence in
Brazil or the Philippines as it is in Utah, Colorado or, for that matter,
America as a whole? Assessing the church's efforts at overseas expansion,
author Joel Kotkin has written that "given the scale of the current
religious revival combined with the formidable organizational resources
of the church, the Mormons could well emerge as the next great global tribe,
fulfilling, as they believe, the prophecies of ancient and modern prophets."

Hinckley puts it another way. "We're celebrating this year the
150th anniversary of the arrival of the Mormon pioneers," he says.
"From that pioneer beginning, in this desert valley where a plow had
never before broken the soil, to what you see today ... this is a story
of success." It would be unwise to bet against more of the same.